Given their rhetoric? Yup. The airs that they put on to delude themselves have been quite effective, quite honestly, at least for self-delusion purposes about the group that they're loyal to, and, well, if you tell people something confidently, people will tend to believe you if they're not well acquainted with the topic. For that matter, a whole bunch of Republicans don't believe that they're racist, at last check, with varying amounts of truth to their belief and much of the force of the right-wing propaganda machine feeding them a large range of alternative explanations for why a whole lot of them are being called racist, what racist actually means (and why it's the Democrats who are actually racists, not them), and who's being most affected by the racism that actually does exist.
Either way, I've heard similar BS lines, redefinitions, and justifications from quite a few of them. I admit to being initially swayed by some of it - until I had reason to verify the accuracy properly and found quite a bit of it to be a steaming pile of manure, supported largely by entirely tangential truths to what they're actually arguing.
